>The classic comment on this topic was by Tom Watson, the early leader of IBM. (Not the golfer). He said the railroad companies went wrong thinking they were in the railroad business, not the transportation business.
>
>I guess as software developers we are in the ultimate ever-changing business. A year ago is a long time ago in software.
>
Jos hit the nail on the head, we are in the solutions business, solutions for people who use computers. In that sense our mission hasn't changed much at all over the decades, just the tools we have available with which to offer the solutions. When I first started it was called Data Processing and now a days often referred to as Information Technology. Either way, we offer solutions for working with Information. Coincidentally, that's why for us the speed of a disk drive shuffling data around is often more important than the speed of the processor doing computations - we shuffle data more than we ponder over it. It seems the only place where a speedy processor is really beneficial is to give the GUI more snap so we can present the results quicker, again information processing.